


Where The Heart Is

by ScriveSpinster



Category: Sunless Skies
Genre: Drabbles, Gen, Living spaces, POV Second Person, officers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-24 04:16:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19165636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriveSpinster/pseuds/ScriveSpinster
Summary: Everyone’s got somewhere they belong.(Speculations on the officers and their quarters.)





	Where The Heart Is

**Author's Note:**

> Vague spoilers for the Eccentric’s story.

1.

The Incautious Driver surrounds themselves with clutter – half-empty teacups and half-finished diagrams strewn across available surfaces – but stepping into their space, the overwhelming impression is less of disarray than of _green._

Most of one wall is taken up by crates of plants and fungus from the Reserve, hardy enough to survive the skies. The Driver talks to them, sometimes, and sometimes listens, as though the plants might be talking back. Maybe they are. You’ve seen stranger things, out among the stars. 

All you really know is that the light feels different there – warmer, more gentle than anything of Judgment born.

2.

The Fortunate Navigator’s shelves resemble a museum display set in a gaming hall: cards and dice, trophies of bone and claw, a collection of fine-crafted daggers. The greatest concession to mess is the stories of swashbuckling and danger stacked haphazardly on his nightstand.

It’s cozy, if you don’t mind the corpse occupying the most comfortable chair.

The Navigator doesn’t attempt to converse with the corpse, though he’ll read to it sometimes, or share embellished details from his own adventures. He knows it’s dead – that there’s nothing left to listen.

Thing is, he says, it doesn’t matter. Altan’s still his friend.

3.

The Rat Brigade are good at finding a place, whether that place’s nominal owners consider them welcome or not. They’re less used to a place being freely given.

They could have a cabin to themselves – _Same work,_ the policy goes, _same pay, same concessions_ – but Cinders says they’ve no bloody use for that. Not quite ratlike, is it, all that empty space?

They’ve appropriated a corner of the galley for a nest instead, warm and quilted, all the safer with their considerable arsenal in reach. They’ll defend it.

They’ll defend this whole damned train if needed. After all – it’s theirs.

4.

The Repentant Devil sees to his own supplies. 

His tastes are particular and peculiar: chorister nectar stirred with sweet cream, crushed rose petals and a dusting of pollen. Fungal brandy that anyone who isn’t a devil wouldn’t want to take a sip of accidentally. His furnishings are luxurious, his walls lined with books. Best not read the titles; even those written in scripts that don’t burn are liable to inflict nightmares. Still, he’s pleasant enough, should you drop by for tea and conversation, and he welcomes company.

Your soul will almost _certainly_ still be in your possession when you leave.

5.

The Inconvenient Aunt has a fondness for craftwork and stitching; lace doilies and ceramic ornaments adorn every surface, and the wall above the door holds a piece of framed embroidery saying _Home is home, wherever you go._

And it is a homey little room, with a bowl on the table filled with boiled sweets, and a tin of biscuits ready for any eventuality. There are pawn shops with fewer knick-knacks.

Now, standing at the epicenter of this contained explosion of kitsch and comfort, ask yourself this: what in this room does not belong? Anything? Would you be able to tell?

6.

The Princess’s smile is radiant as she surveys her domain.

There are shiny trinkets scattered about – gold and silver, Navartine gemstones, diamonds and sapphires and pearls. There are bottles, and the things in them. There are bones. And there are two suitors who look at you with watery eyes and rictus smiles.

Don’t overstay your welcome. The Princess is easily bored. You can slip out, perhaps, when she turns to chide the Poet for hovering too close. The door will close behind you, almost silent, leaving you alone.

Go read through the Devil’s bookshelf. It might make you feel better.

7.

The Clay Conductor needs little, and is accustomed to owning less even than that. 

His room is clean and spare, containing only drawers filled with identical folded uniforms, a double-reinforced bed, and a battered suitcase holding sheet music and, lately, a scattering of postcards. The traces of his life. If there are few of them, he values them all the more highly – but even they are only shadows of the songs he knows, the places he’s seen; what matters most doesn’t need a suitcase to carry it. 

As long as he remembers that, nothing he owns can be truly taken.

8.

The Eccentric makes her home in the engine room.

She likes to see that things are running smoothly, and she finds it easier to settle to sleep surrounded by the low, constant music of well-tended machinery. Like a lullaby, she tells you, handing you a chipped mug of tea, or at least what she supposes a lullaby must be like. 

She was never a child in the conventional sense. She was built, like the engine; she built herself into something better, and now she works at building the engine into something better too.

She‘s happy here, she says. She belongs.

9.

There’s something lonely about the Fatalistic Signalman’s cabin. 

He’s made it his own, settled in as much as anyone can, but it has the feel of a place gone too long unused that still seems slightly empty. The lamps are bright, but the air is cold. He works feverishly – his efforts obvious in the stacks of paper piling up day by day, the notes gone from neat to frantic with the passage of time – but he’ll take a minute or two, if you ask, to share a dreadful tale or commiserate over old regrets.

Ask, then. Listen. 

You cannot give him much, but you’ve given him a home.


End file.
